


A Wish For Flippers That Worked

by BenevolentErrancy



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Drowning, Friendship, Gen, Mission Fic, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 07:08:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9167686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BenevolentErrancy/pseuds/BenevolentErrancy
Summary: Lúcio had grown up surrounded by water.  You didn't live your entire life in Rio de Janeiro without feeling a certain affinity for the sea – learning to swim had been second nature.This wasn't Rio though, and when Lúcio takes a bad hit and finds himself deep in the frigid Northern Pacific Ocean he makes a horrible realization: all those years of swimming didn't mean anything, not when you had pound upon pound of metal strapped to your feet.





	

**Author's Note:**

> km fill:  
> "Looking at all the metal and electronics on Lucio's leg armor, all I can think is, 'if that boy gets knocked into some deep water, he's fucked'.  
> Make it so, fillers. Give me a fluffy rescue from a (near?) drowning. No character death, obviously."
> 
> This is a slightly lazy fill done for the sake of writing and my burning need for more gen team dynamics

It was a strange sort of report that saw them out on western most coast of the United States. Word had been picked up by McCree who had been ambling his way back to Overwatch from somewhere in the southwest – what he'd been looking for in the desert he had been oddly elusive about, but he had been very keen on sharing what he'd _found_. Reports on new, hostile omnic activity.

Not the sort of activist activity that Overwatch had been focusing on mediating in King's Row but instead something that sounded unnervingly like what was currently being experienced in Russia, if on a much smaller scale. McCree had come with reports about omnic units moving in small groups, never more than three, but they were cropping up from numerous different cities all over the States. All the reports mentioned the omnics as unresponsive and immediately hostile, offering no demands or explanation before opening fire on citizens – like another damn God Program, McCree had said grimly. So in short order their already-strained resources had been scraped up and redirected, and a small team headed by Athena was ready to start investigating reports to figure out _what_ was going on.

What they had found, going rather against expectations, wasn't a re-activated omnium or even the digital footprints of another awoken God Program, but sign after sign that pointed towards a small factory that would have once been in the industrial district of a completely unremarkable town had it been a couple decades ago and which was now little more than a ghost town – one of many small towns that had failed along with the various economic crashes of the past half a century. The factory itself didn't even show signs of having been repurposed to somehow produce the highly complex mechanisms of an omnic. Still, these reports couldn't be ignored so a strike team was put together and set out. Once there they were able to confirm their suspicions, that this was simply what it looked like: a basic robotics factory. Torbjörn grimly informed them that while the body structure of these bots was made so that it mimicked the appearance of common omnic models almost disturbingly well these weren't sentient. They were programmed robots, not omnics.

The implied motives of creating such things left Lúcio with a bad taste in his mouth. This wasn't violence against an enemy or a perceived wrong, it wasn't even fear or anger; this was deliberate, malicious intent to scare folks into thinking even worse of the omnics. No one wanted to think that another omnic war could be stirring in the States, but damn, if people here were messed up enough to make robots pretending to be homicidal omnics – that was almost worse, in Lúcio's books, than the anger growing in Britain.

It did, however, mean an easier fight than they'd been anticipated. Thinking they were going to be fighting advanced, combative omnics that may or may not be working under the command of a God Program, the team had been stacked before moving out: Morrison himself was heading the team, along with Törbjorn as their omnic expert, Fareeha and Hana were there for additional firepower, Zarya because when she'd heard that omnics may be at work she had refused to be left behind, as well as Lúcio to handle the medical side of things. (Angela had offered to join but it was obviously done with some reluctance – another team lead by Winston was due to arrive back at the Watchpoint shortly and she was obviously keen on having the infirmary ready for them, especially after report came back that Tracer had been experiencing some sort of problem with her chronal accelerator – and Zenyatta hadn't even been considered for this mission. If a God Program was at work they didn't want him anywhere near it, no matter how securely his systems were locked down). It turned out that Lúcio would be more than enough medical assistance though, since while the factory _had_ been stuffed with the robots when they'd arrived, finding them to be non-sentient, half-finished, preprogramed robots was, on a tactical level, a pleasant surprise.

The fact that a number of them were equipped with concussive rocket launchers was less so, but Lúcio had the music pumping and the team energized, keeping them light on their feet and easily dodging the blasts.

Or so he'd thought.

The fight hadn't taken long to push beyond the doors of the factor – Lúcio supposed even the robots had a complex enough combat matrix to realize that staying in a cramped space with Zarya's particle cannon (and frustration) bearing down on them was a poor decisions. It was a good thing little existed in this town besides for stray dogs and seagulls. The fighting had pushed down the streets, and it was only thanks to Pharah that the battle stayed as contained as it was, with her firing down rockets and concussive shots to corral robots that attempted to scatter or flank. Despite even her best efforts though, it didn't take long to find themselves along the town's crumbling seawall, which was little more than a cliff that over looked Pacific Ocean as it rumbled and roared beneath them.

At one point Lúcio imagined this was a nice spot. Now though the grass grew in ugly tuffs and the plants had gone wild; benches were rotting and what had once been a bike path had been chewed up by time – and now, their own weapons. Still, it was a good place for Lúcio to fight. The hard-light skates had no trouble with the grass and rocks, and everything was wide open, making it easy for him to slip and slide among his team mates, or show an unfortunate robot standing to close to the cliffside that his rig was good for more than pumping the jams. In fact, the only thing that stopped this from being almost pleasant – or as pleasant as a live-fire operation could be – was the bitterly cold wind that swept up off the ocean.

Maybe, Lúcio would reflect later, he had let himself get cocky. He had just leapt neatly onto the wall of what had once been a public washroom, gliding effortlessly along its side with a gleeful laugh as he avoided the blast of rockets that had landed where his feet had been not half a minute ago.

“Too slow!” he crowed, and adjusted his momentum just enough to blast another two waiting robots directly into D.Va's line of fire with a soundwave.

Maybe he shouldn't have let his attention be divided, maybe he shouldn't have tried to send a cocky message off to Hana, some sort of “your welcome” for setting the targets right up for her, maybe he should have realized by now exactly how much danger an open ledge could be. Maybe he should have just decided to stay home in bed when he heard the mission was going to be on the cold, windy, American coast. But he hadn't done any of those things, so he hadn't been prepared when a second rocket hit the side of the building he was gliding on, shattering the brick at his feet and sending crushing force slamming against him.

The hit itself was hardly worth mentioning. The rocket had gone wide, hitting the wall and making it buck and crumble under Lúcio feet rather than hitting him. The real problem that came was the blast that came with it when it hit the wall. Already struggling to keeps his balance as the wall gave way, the blast was enough to send Lúcio toppling backwards – and backward. And he braced for impact, already twisting to catch himself with his gloved hands and armoured legs, but the impact didn't come. Rather than being tossed against hard pavement and stony grass, only cold, open air met him.

And down Lúcio fell, with a screaming building in his mouth, as he plummeted towards the ocean's yawning depths.

-

Lúcio had grown up surrounded by water. You didn't live your entire life in Rio de Janeiro without feeling a certain affinity for the sea – learning to swim had been second nature.

Hot sun over your head, hot sand crushing beneath your feet, and, of course, warm water embracing you the moment you broke free of the beach and dived beneath its welcoming surface...

This was not a Brazilian sea, not one of the local, urban beaches that he and his friends used to spend their free time running around.

Hitting the water, at the height and angle he fell at, was like hitting stone and the wind was immediately knocked out of him as he crashed against its surface. Immediately after came the cold. The water was like ice, and falling into it was like having his entire body covered over in needles that shook his spine with chills and made it nearly impossible to catch back any of the breath he had lost.

Still, even then he might have been okay. He could see the cliffside he'd fallen from not far from where he was, and if he pushed he'd be able to fight the cold and get to its beach. Except it didn't take long for realization – and panic – to grip him: all those years of swimming didn't mean anything, not when you had pound upon pound of metal strapped to your feet.

Lucio had re-purposed his skates himself from pilfered Vishkar tech and they worked, in his humble opinion, remarkably well. Not only did they offer fantastic support, letting him take hits and falls and drops that would have stopped him dead before, but their hard light blades let him _fly_ , flitting about a battlefield (or protest or riot) like a living, breathing soundwave, heart beating out a rhythm along side his music, every bit of him becoming synced up with the battle.

The skates being homemade though also meant though that they didn't have the streamlined efficiency that some of their engineering-inclined teammates could have possibly gotten. Junkrat, for one, had been suitably impressed by the hard-light and had been weaseling Lúcio for a chance to pull them apart, but once Junkrat had taken one in his hand he'd laughed at him. Too heavy for legs, he'd told Lúcio, and had then disassembled his own peg leg to show off the carefully selected, lightweight scrap used to build it, explaining the intentional use of negative space used when creating the arm. Vaswani was another story all together. Her and Lúcio were never destined to be friends and she had made that abundantly clear, but she had taken one look at what Lucio had done to her company's technology and sneered, like he'd presented her a pile of dog shit. Still, it hadn't bothered Lúcio. What did it matter if they were heavy when he didn't use them for walking? Unlike the team members with full-time prosthetics, this was power armour, not that far removed from Fareeha's or Reinhardt's. And when it was in use, it moved under its own energy, giving him the speed to duck and weave around hostiles and keep his squad pumped up.

It was only now though, as he felt himself crash through the icy water before he was even able to think about trying to catch himself, that he realized the true dangers of this design choice. He kicked futilely, but the water was destroying the circuits and he could feel their power die as it required more and more of his own strength to try to get the legs to move – he hardly even lift his legs like this, never mind get the momentum to push himself upward.

What more they were _shorting out_.

Lúcio gave a weak cry that surrounded him in an explosion of bubbles (bubbles of what may very well be his life escaping his lungs) as they sparked and the electricity shot up his spine like an amp misfiring. His muscles, already struggling to do their job under the dragging, dragging weight, twitched and ached but he had to push, he had to _swim_ or he was _going to die_. His hands scrambled upwards, as if he could catch and cling onto the water's surface, but even that was far above him now, hands simply writhing in unending water and his feet pulled him further and further down, into a crushing blackness that made his desperate lungs hurt more and more. Soon, there wasn't even an up anymore, he couldn't figure out how he was falling, where he was, as the world plummeted and twisted around him and everything started to get fuzzy around the edges. He gave one, futile scream as another shock hit him, as if he hoped someone, anyone, could hear him – and almost more felt than saw the bubbles burst forth and then he _breathed in_. As if somehow he could have become more like the frog he'd claimed for himself, become a tadpole, become something amphibious that could find life down here, but water filled him and burned him and Lúcio knew it. This was the end. This had to be the end.

-

Hana saw Lúcio go down.

She had started, seeing how violently it had sent him flying back, but she'd heard the splash and wasn't immediately concerned – better to hit the water than the rocks, right? Her main concern was how close that rocket had come to hitting. Lúcio's music was a boost they all desperately needed, but would it be enough to heal himself if he'd been caught in the blast itself? She froze for a moment of indecision, eye on the battle itself which had been pushed further down the coast, but with Pharah circling above and enforcing a perimeter that their opponents were lucky to breech, and with the team picking off the rest of them as they were shepherded by Pharah's whims (and rockets) Hana felt safe in taking a moment longer to check on Lúcio before racing back in. Besides, this way she could scoop up Lúcio and fly in like a hero, tank and healer all in one place.

So with a jerk of joysticks, the mech diverted and ran towards the edge so Hana could lean over. She'd been worried about seeing a winded, weak Lúcio clinging to the narrow band of beach – little more than an apron of boulders – and had been down right scared of the possibility of finding him too weak even for that, struggling to stay afloat with burns or breaks.

She hadn't expected not to see him at all.

Panic surged, a million possibilities hitting her all at once (the blast got closer to him than she'd feared and he was too badly injured to swim, he'd hit his head on the rocks and knocked himself unconscious, he was already dead). Hana didn't hesitate. With a flick of a switch, she had the hatch of her mech open and was popping out. It was always nerve-wracking to be exposed in the midst of a battle, as her jumpsuit's defense matrix was definitely not made to take a lot of punishment – it was a last defense if everything else went wrong – but there wasn't enough time to worry about that. She would sooner take a soggy jumpsuit than experimenting to see if several tons of offense mech floated (the answer was that it didn't – their instructors had been _very_ clear on that, one of the reasons for the eject button to exist) and she'd take all of that over a Lúcio that _still hadn't breached the surface._

If there was one thing that being taken out of high school to be trained as an elite military force piloting massive experimental weapon systems did to a person, it was ensure that fearlessness came as natural as breathing, so it was with a single, deep breathe that Hana threw herself off the side of the cliff.

Hitting the water burned. She split the surface in a neat dive – she'd always enjoyed swimming in gym class – but it was still from enough of a height that she felt the contact, and that was to say nothing of the shocking cold or the way the salt stung her eyes. Finding him, at least, was not hard; the hardlight structures of his skates cast the water in a sickly, flickering glow. No, the problem, she realized, was when with a few sharp strokes she reached him and tried to pull him up after her.

She couldn't.

She hadn't even considered it. It wasn't like Lúcio was a foot taller than her like some of their teammates were, he and her were almost at par, and Hana, while no Zarya, was strong enough – you had to be, to be allowed in the MEKA program. It was only after a moment of breathless panic as she felt Lúcio's body tugging her down even as she tried to swim upwards that she realized: those shiny skates were more than just a convenient light source in the dark water. It was the modern equivalent of some gangster in one of those old movies encasing someone's feet in cement.

So Hana had to make one of the hardest choices of her life, certainly much harder than choosing to jump off a cliff after him. She chose to let go, and swim back up to the surface.

-

“-elp!” Hana's voice crackled through Fareeha's comm system as she did another sweep over the fight, rockets targeting the robots that dared try to make a break for the fringes. “Lúcio's down! I can't– I couldn't–”

A burst of chatter rained down the comm line from the other agents, and Fareeha immediately banked in the air, giving her suit a shot of power as she burst further into the air, immediately trying to pick up a location even as they spoke. The HUD in the Raptora's helmet skimmed the entire battlefield, ally signatures picked up neatly in blue, enemy in red. She wasn't picking up any that looked like Lúcio, not even the sign of a downed body. Then she spotted the D.Va's mech. She was shooting towards it when she realized it wasn't simply standing there guarding a body, but deserted entirely; Hana's signature was not in there.

“In the water! Lúcio fell in– I can't get him! He's too heavy!”

The concern in Fareeha's chest spiked into cold fear. “I'm on it,” she announced over the comms, loud enough to be heard over the sudden roar of the suit as she launched herself towards the cliffside – and sure enough, as soon as she cleared it the HUD picked up Hana's signature and she could just make out the girl, struggling to paddle out in the open water.

With more speed than was perhaps wise, Fareeha dropped, landing heavily on the thin strip of what passed for a beach – it was little more than a band of massive, cracked stone but she was able to wedge herself securely enough against the cliff to remove the Raptora. There was, technically, a very specific, methodical way of removing the suit – it took time, but it ensured that suit remained in the best possible working order. However, the suit also had emergency release clasps. These ran risks of damage suit seams and integrated systems though, and Fareeha rarely used them because she knew in the long run she would be committing to hours of maintenance to return it to peak performance levels; this didn't cross her mind though as she let the armour pieces fall off around her. With a final toss and a kick, she flung aside her helmet and stepped out of the boots leaving only herself and the black combat suit she wore underneath the armour that integrated her fully with its systems. It was in this that she dove into the water, and in a few powerful strokes was out at where Hana bobbed.

The girl looked frantic – and frozen. Her skin was pale from the cold water that had stolen Fareeha's breath when she'd first jumped in and she could see the shivers and goosebumps running up her body.

“Straight below?” she demanded, and Hana nodded. “Get back to shore and try to warm up – be ready for us.” Fareeha didn't wait for a response before turning and diving straight down.

At first there was nothing but the cold and the darkness as she kicked downwards, trusting that Hana was right and that if she kept going she would find Lúcio, but then there was a flicker. At first her mind flashed to childish stories about deep sea monsters and sinister, long-fanged, bio-luminescent fish, but then she realized what it was. Like a dying light bulb, Lúcio's skates flickered dimly, casting the gloom in an eerie, blue light. Fortunately, this close to the cliffside it wasn't as deep as it could have been. It only took a couple more sweeps to reach where Lúcio's body was crumpled, unresponsive, amid the rocks of the ocean's floor. Wrapping her arms around him, Fareeha kicked off the rocky ground hard enough to make even her numb feet sting, but it didn't carry her far – even over half a foot shorter than her it was like he was weighed down with lead.

Or, she thought, as the light flickered again, kilograms worth of stolen hard-light technology.

She had suited up with him plenty in the past though, and had seen how he put the armoured leggings on. Her lungs were beginning to complain at this point, but with numb, clumsy fingers she fumbled for the clasps and with one click after another the armour was finally released. As a final touch, she tore off the sonic amp that dangled from Lúcio's arm and let it sink, before hefting the now much lighter man into his arms and pushing off.

Breaching the surface was a relief that filled her like a starburst as she gasped and choked on her painfully held breath and sucked in grateful mouthfuls of air. Perversely though, rising above the water only seemed to make the chill worse.

“Oh thank god.”

Shaking water and clinging hair from her eyes, Fareeha could make out Hana standing on the stony beach looking cold and anxious. Each stroke towards shore was too long. Her body was becoming heavy and lethargic in the cold water, and even with her strength it was getting harder and harder to keep a hold of Lúcio's body.

Lúcio's still unresponsive body.

“He's not breathing!” she shouted as soon as she was within reach of the rocks.

Hana was immediately half in the water again, helping pulll Lúcio onto the shore as Fareeha scrambled up, cutting open her palms as she slipped on the slick stones. By the time she'd pulled herself up, Hana had already pressed her cold, shaking fingers against Lúcio's neck, seeking a pulse. When she looked up with wild, terrified eyes, Fareeha took over. While she had no doubt that MEKA had trained its pilots with some form of medical knowledge, there was something striking about seeing Hana out of her mech, with her pastel jumpsuit and long hair plastered around her pale, shocked face and remember that she was still a teenager. So without a moment's more hesitation, Fareeha began chest compressions and artificial ventilation.

-

Lúcio's first sensation was that everything hurt.

Everything. Deeper, and in ways he wouldn't have ever expected a body to be able to hurt.

Before he was even fully awake, he was lurching, gagging and gasping as burning water forced its way up his throat and through his nose. He was only partially conscious of someone grip his shoulders and holding him steady as he continued to cough and gasp, his heart pounding in his throat as his lungs struggled to replace salt water with fresh air. It had felt like something had been slamming itself against his chest though and every breath _hurt_. He had vague memories of a fight – of a mission with Overwatch, and omnics... had he fallen in battle? Was he being attacked?

But no, the hands holding him were steady but gentle.

The next thing he was aware of, when he was able to think past the desperate need for air and the way his entire sinuses burnt like someone had poured magma down them, was that he was _freezing_. Shivers wracked his body and his muscles were tense to the point of pain; he probably would have fallen over even sitting as he was if it weren't for the hot holding his shoulders and the body pressed against his, keeping him steady as he threw up. Then came the awareness of the rocks. It was no Rio beach of rolling sand here, instead he lay hunched on sharp, shattered daggers of stone that bit into his palms and thighs as he shuddered against them.

The final thing he noticed before his senses finally opened up beyond the small bubble of hurt that was his body, was the kinder reminder that the world was not all crushing darkness and empty lungs and pain.

“Lúcio? Lúcio are you okay? Oh thank _god_...” Hana was kneeling in front of him, one hand pushing back his sopping hair to keep it out of his face as he spat up water, and the other pressed against his cheek. She felt as cold as he did but it was such a relief to be able to look up and see her before all else. To have a friend there, dragging him back from whatever awful place he'd disappeared to.

“What happened?” he tried to ask, but it came out in wheezes. His throat felt raw and each word was so interspersed with coughing that he wasn't sure if it was even sensible. “Robots?” he tried again. He remembered... robots. And darkness. Falling – a rocket...

“You took a bad hit in the fight, went straight into the ocean.” Lúcio started a bit, though he shouldn't be surprised to hear someone other than Hana. He was obviously leaning against someone, and that someone, he realized, was Fareeha. It almost didn't make sense, because Fareeha was _never_ seen out of her Raptora on the battlefield – heck, Angela always complained that she had a hard enough time getting Fareeha to leave the power suit behind even on their off days – and what he was leaning against was definitely not the hard edges of an offensive flight suit. She, too, was dripping wet, black hair plastered to her face.

“All good down there?” came Zarya's voice from somewhere far above them.

“M'good,” Lúcio attempted to say.

He wasn't sure if his volume was still weak or if he was just being ignored, because Fareeha called up, “Everyone stable, but it is imperative that we get somewhere warm. Lúcio's going to need to be checked out by Angela as soon as we can manage it, but before that all three of us are going to need to warm up. A lot. How are you up there?”

“Ha, we finished off your job easily while you were all playing on the beach,” Zarya crowed. “Morrison is doing a sweep. Will you be able to get back up on your own, or should I start looking for a rope?”

Hana shook her head vaguely. “I could fly us up by my mech's on the cliff...”

Fareeha chewed on her lip. “It might take a bit of time but I'm pretty sure I could get the Raptora operational enough to make a couple trips back up the cliff. I need to make sure nothing got damaged in the removal first though...”

Lúcio started to zone out a little then. Fareeha and Zarya were having a shouted discussion about the logistics of getting the Raptora suit back together and whether or not it would be stable enough for several trips up and down the cliffside, but Lúcio found himself much more interested in the way Hana had curled up next to him. She and Fareeha were both chilled, but the press of any sort of body heat was such a relief even as he shivered between them. Knowing that the battle was over and that apparently everyone had come out the other side okay made it that much easier to relax.

In the end, Fareeha did get up, leaving Lúcio and Hana to support each other, while she reassembled the Rapotra and, with a little spluttering on the suit's part, succeeded in getting all of them back onto the seawall.

Lúcio hadn't realized exactly how cold the coastal wind was until this second

“I'm not sure we can make the walk all the way back to the drop ship,” Fareeha said to Zarya as she set Lúcio down.

“And we still need to get a better look at that factory,” said Törbjorn who'd joined them with Morrison shortly after Fareeha's first ascent. “Someone is behind this mess and I want to dig for their dirty little fingerprints in those computers of theirs.”

“It would not be advisable for them to be out in a cold wind while already dangerously chilled,” Zarya said. “Hypothermia is best not to test. It is deserted here – rather than return to the ship, perhaps there is a house nearby we could 'borrow' temporarily.”

Morrison nodded. “That would be a good idea. We can use it as a temporary base of operations. If you four can find one and secure its perimeter, we'll join you once we finish investigating the factory.”

“Will you be alright going alone?” asked Hana. “I can probably warm up in the mech...”

Morrison just shook his head. “If there are any robots left in that factory I'd be surprised, it'd be nothing Torb and I can't handle. The rest of you go warm up. You all did good today, soldiers.”

“Some of us more than others,” said Zarya, nudging Lúcio in the ribs, making him gasp even with the numbness.

“Sorry, I may have cracked something,” said Fareeha ruefully. “If you three are good walking, I'll fly ahead and see what I can find.

-

The walk was harder than anything Lúcio could have anticipated. Even if they weren't going all the way back to the drop ship, the coordinates that Fareeha had ended up sending wasn't even two kilometers away, but it felt like he may as well have decided to walk back to the Watchpoint himself. It felt strange walking while they were still on a mission rather than gliding along effortlessly on his hard-light blades. He hadn't even thought to ask what had happened to them until he was standing back above the sea with his knees buckling, and by then he was too tired to bother and felt he could hazard a pretty good guess. He supposed Vaswani wouldn't have to turn her nose up at them anymore, not with them down at the bottom of some American ocean.

“Need me to carry you, little man?” Zarya asked cheerfully, as Lúcio stumbled for the third time as they picked their way down the side streets.

“Nah, m'good, m'good,” Lúcio insisted.

God, would he even be able to rebuild them? He knew how they worked well enough, had designed them himself, had performed countless repairs, but it had always been with pre-existing Vishkar tech as a base. What would he do in battle without his sonic amplifier? As much as he loved his music career, the thought of needing to walk away from Overwatch, all because of a stupid, careless mistake on his part...

“Whoa there,” said Zarya, catching his arm and his foot caught an uneven corner of pavement and he nearly fell flat on his face. The hand was warm and grounding and Lúcio was tempted to just close his eyes and let it wash away the chill that had dug his claws into his skin.

“...I may be rethinking that offer of yours,” Lúcio admitted.

Even he wasn't entirely sure if he was kidding or not, but in the end it didn't really matter because before he could say anything else Zarya laughed, grabbed him by the arm, and swung him onto her back.

“You comfy there, Lúcio?” Hana called from inside her retrieved mech, to which Lúcio shot her a rude gesture.

“This is one of the perks of barely being over five feet tall,” he informed her. As well as a perk of being in the blast radius of a hostile's missile, bruising your body from that and the subsequent fall of a cliff, nearly drowning, and finally being resuscitated with a chill that had worked its way into your bones. And Zarya radiated heat, so by the time they reached the house Fareeha had commandeered it was all he could do not to fall completely asleep – he clung to wakefulness though, he would maintain at least some of his dignity.

-

The house was better than anything he could have hoped. While it had obviously been picked over by looters, large pieces of furniture were still there and surprisingly intact. Lúcio wondered what the story of this town, of this family, were. Where had they gone? Why had they left so much of their previous life sitting in an abandoned house? Were they okay? All those thoughts were flushed from his mind though when Fareeha revealed the pièce-de-résistance: a functional fireplace that she was already loaded up with wood that looked like it had once been a part of a dining set.

Once warmth was blossoming in the room, and a mountain of blankets had been pilfered from around the house, he, Hana, and Fareeha were able to strip out of their wet clothes and bundle themselves deep within the blankets. Within minutes, Lúcio was drifting dreamily somewhere between awake and sleeping.

He only woke properly again when Fareeha, lifted a finger from her ear and said, “That was Jack over the comms. Apparently they think they've found enough to identify whoever was behind the robots. Looks like it was a successful mission, welll done everyone.”

“I've had better,” said Hana, from under her pile of blankets.

“Next time we're fighting killer robots, can it be somewhere warm?” Lúcio asked.

“Ha! You should try fighting omnics on the Siberian Front,” she told him. “That is when you know you're alive.”

“I am _pretty_ sure that would be when I would know I'm dead,” said Lúcio, more than happy to keep his toes tucked under the heated blanket rather than imagine a Russian winter.

“I agree, we deserve a proper beach day, with less drowning and more sun,” said Hana.

“Maybe no more beaches for a little while...” said Fareeha.

Honestly, Lúcio agreed with her. As much as he may love the ocean, he could stand to be landlocked for a little while. At least until he got his gear replaced. Until then though, he was content to stay in a warm house, under blankets and surrounded by teammates. Given that it was an abandoned house in a town by a sea he'd nearly drowned in, it was all... surprisingly domestic. Cozy. Even the cold had finally begun to be worked from his bones and breathing was becoming easier and easier as the burn of salt water died. His ribs still hurt, but he knew as soon as they were back at the Watchpoint Angela or Zenyatta could see to that.

While he suspected it would be a long time before he forgot the feeling of being dragged down into the darkness, he would also always carry with him the feeling of knowing he had friends would would just as soon dive in after him and bring him safely home again.

 


End file.
